Buried in the driver’s seat of a 3,400-pound stock car, strapped in five different harnesses while engulfed in a two-sizes-too-big quilted firesuit is not the time to let fear creep into your conscious thoughts.

“I just want to go as fast as possible,” I calmly told my driving instructor, Donnie, through my headset. “But ask me again in five minutes.”

He flipped a switch igniting the car, and its massive 600-horsepower engine began to rumble beneath me.

And then my memory went black.

***

A month ago, I stood at the edge of the wall on pit road at Charlotte Motor Speedway, close enough to feel the exhaust from Kevin Harvick’s car balloon and burst its fiery heat in my face. His tires squealed as he and his car burned out and went screaming down the apron, a plume of smoke and rubber wafting lazily in its wake.

I started shaking before his front tires even pulled onto the track.

It wasn’t out of fear. It was my body’s natural reaction to the adrenaline spiking and coursing through my veins.

Even with two feet solidly planted on the ground, my heart fluttered as the potential energy reverberated throughout my body seeking an escape.

I’ve never been a NASCAR fan, despite living nearly equidistant to both Dover International Speedway and Pocono Raceway as a kid. In fact, I even share a last name with Joseph "Doc" Mattioli, the founder of Pocono Raceway, though not any close family ties.

I joined a group of a dozen grown men casting sideways glances at each other, no doubt wondering why I was here and why I was alone.

I don't blame them. I was wondering that myself.

After signing four pages worth of legalese, I lined up to be fitted for my firesuit.

“Sorry sweetie, these aren’t really made to fit women,” the attendant said while handing me a massive armful of quilted sleeves and pantlegs.

That wasn’t an exaggeration. The suit’s sleeves extended approximately three inches past my fingertips; its bulky shoulders giving me a linebacker’s silhouette.

Wearing a firesuit feels like being swathed in a pillowy, quilted cocoon — by all means not an unpleasant experience, save for the fact that the outside temperature was 94 degrees.

***

“Have you ever driven a stick-shift before?” our crew chief asked each one of us as we filed into the auditorium to watch Petty’s orientation video.

“Never tried,” I told him, then promptly forgot about this particular exchange.

After a 20-minute orientation video about each car’s safety features and the Driving Experience’s commitment to driver safety, our group was ushered out of the auditorium and headed toward pit road.

Many of us in the group were first-time racecar drivers and, truthfully, I expected a little more guidance about driving lines and the track’s guide markings.

One-by-one, we posed in front of a racecar for the obligatory photo opportunity before heading to a tent and meeting our instructors. Pit crew members flitted around in the background preparing our cars: checking tires, opening hoods, revving engines.

Our crew chief announced the lineup, with each car’s availability dictated by the driver’s height.

Petty’s experience has about 150 cars in its rotation, all of which are built to real racecar specifications, but altered to be more durable than the ones the pros are driving.

As the shortest driver in our heat, I was assigned to the No. 3 car, a Chevrolet Impala with Austin Dillon’s decals. Unfortunately, I was 12th in line to start out of 14 drivers. Only two cars are allowed on the track at a time for safety reasons, so I was in for a little bit of a wait.

I’m impatient by design. Couple that with being wrapped up in flame-retardant material baking in the late morning sun while surrounded by strangers striking up nervous conversation, and the wait felt like years.

***

“Kami Mattioli, please come over to be fitted for your helmet.”

Finally, I thought.

Someone handed me a spandex skully to tuck my hair into and then I squeezed my head into the massive silver helmet. The helmet was rather heavy. I joked that I felt like a human bobblehead.

I still wasn’t nervous.

I just felt ready, laughing and dancing around as the pit crew prepared my car.

“Feet first, and be careful with your head.”

For the first time all day, I appreciated being just 5-5. Trying to climb into the car through the driver’s window requires a little bit of grace and lot of twisting and maneuvering.

The window’s clearance is maybe 15 inches tall at best, and the driver’s seat is so cramped by harnesses and instruments that there’s little wiggle room.

Oh, and you’re not only wearing a cumbersome space helmet — you’re also fitted with a neck and shoulder brace called a HANS (Head And Neck Support) device.

The HANS is a U-shaped brace made out of carbon fiber that rests on a driver’s shoulders and is anchored to his or her helmet. In the event of a sudden stop or crash, the HANS prevents a driver from whiplash by distributing torsion and energy to the driver’s chest and shoulders rather than exerting that energy on the neck.

It’s relatively lightweight, but wearing a helmet and a HANS very much restricts your range of motion, making it difficult to do much but look straight ahead.

A NASCAR driver’s seat is a claustrophobic person’s hell.

***

As soon as you plant your butt behind the wheel, a pit crew member begins buckling what feels like a dozen seatbelts and harnesses.

One came over and reached in through the window, popping the steering wheel onto the steering shaft.

All around the car, crew members buzzed in a flurry of preparatory activities.

Because I was strapped in to the HANS and the helmet, and tethered to look in one direction, I couldn’t see what they were doing, but I could feel the intensity of their activity ramp up significantly.

When one hooked in all four corners of the car's mesh window, I was officially committed to my decision.

I don’t know at what exact moment I began to realize that this was real — that I was in control of this massive structure of sheet metal and electronics and fuel and was about to steer it around a mile-and-a-half track at a high rate of speed — but I remember it felt as though someone had flipped a switch.

And, well, that’s because my instructor did.

We were off. Kind of.

***

Remember the conversation I told you I had forgotten about earlier? The one where the crew chief asked about my experience with manual cars?

I stalled trying to get off of pit road.

“I thought I was getting a push-off,” I said to Donnie, who was seated next to me in the passenger seat talking me through shifting.

“Nope, we’re gonna get you through this,” he replied with a lot more faith in me than I had in myself.

“Okay, just talk me through it,” I replied, feigning confidence.

And Donnie, who must have been a saint or an otherwise very patient person in another life to repeat this experience 80 times in one day, calmly detailed a step-by-step tutorial.

We rumbled our way down the apron and then slid up the bank to the right, bumping up onto the track.

***

White lines and traffic cones. That’s all I remember seeing.

Double cones meant to press the gas to the floor smoothly and evenly, to await the jolt of energy throttling us forward.

A single cone, to let off slowly and gradually, as we entered into a turn, the car tilting at a 24-degree angle to the track while banking corners.

Two small dashed lines — the guide markers through which I was to guide the car at various spots on the straightaways — flashed by so quickly I wondered if they were a mirage.

Except there wasn’t a lot of time to do much wondering behind the wheel.

I spent the first four laps locating the markers, trying to navigate the speedway’s four turns and guided by Donnie’s voice on the radio piped into my helmet.

I weaved across lanes as I was told — a seamstress behind the wheel stitching some sort of controlled madness on top of the asphalt whose pattern only Donnie could understand and translate.

We got close to the wall at times but I couldn’t see how close we were. I had to trust Donnie’s judgment.

“Right, right, more to the right,” he told me often, making me force my steering wheel to the right, toward those walls.

***

The beginning of the experience was disorienting.

I had no concept of time or speed; if I was lucky, maybe a brief and distorted concept of space every now and then.

The dashboard, full of gadgets and gauges may have been helpful if I were able to see it, but it was just out of my peripheral vision.

If I had any hopes of going as fast as I wanted to, I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road for any fraction of time.

The turns all looked the same, and the laps began to bleed together. I didn’t know where one ended and another began. I forgot the last time I crossed the checkered line. I felt lost, trying my best to focus and follow the instructions I was hearing over the radio.

Though Donnie was less than six inches away from me, it was hard to gauge the situation because I couldn’t see him. Were it not for his hand gestures entering the outer fringe of my sight line every so often, I would have forgotten he actually was in the car.

But on the fifth lap, the car began to drive itself as if suddenly fueled by its own mechanical muscle memory. I didn’t have to fight to understand anymore.

We were one. I was simply guiding it.

I gunned it, pedal to the floorboard coming out of a turn as the straightaway materialized in front of me. I didn’t know it in that moment, but I had hit my top speed of 130 mph.

It didn’t feel fast, relatively speaking, but it felt faster than any of the other accelerations.

Then I had to come from the wall down to the base of the turn in three seconds and accelerate as soon as I got to the white line. The force knocked me back in my seat, pinning me down as if I was in an airplane taking off. I shrugged it off, gripping the steering wheel to pull myself forward.

I was revved up after that burst of speed whet my appetite, ready for Donnie to tell me to shift into fifth gear and really let me fly.

But instead, he reeled me in.

My eight laps were almost done, and as much as I wanted to zoom onto pit road with my tires squealing and maybe do a doughnut or two, that wasn’t going to happen.

I coasted back to our starting point at pit road, the car popping and grunting like a despondent teenager at the slow speed.

I wanted to go faster, too, I thought, coaxing the car to a stop.

***

The flurry of activity around me as the pit crew removed the mesh window, swiftly released me from my harnesses and led me back out the window seemed more intense than all 134,000 empty seats whizzing by at 130 mph.

Driving a racecar is an isolating experience, despite a driver’s support system of the pit crew and spotters.

Sure, there’s constant radio communication, but you’re very much alone in the driver’s seat.

There’s so much to notice around you, but you don’t. You can’t. It’s impossible.

The constant motion is numbing and the attention to detail required to function at such a high level is exhausting. Trying to find equilibrium between the two is a battle.

***

As promised, Donnie asked me again how I felt.

Sweaty and overwhelmed while trying to process what just happened in the previous 12 minutes, I only had one word to offer him.